Book Review - Autumn: Aftermath

Autumn: Aftermath by David Moody
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I used to hate serial fiction. I'd get all annoyed with getting hammered with "this happened previously" which authors do, understandably, to educate people new to their series. I love that David Moody doesn't do that. Each of his books, including this one, could stand on it's own easily enough without all that pointless exposition. They have complete story arcs. They have character development, as much as you expect in an after-the-zombies apocalyptic novel anyway.

But oh my god I was so happy to see some familiar faces in this book. If you've read others in this series, you know that uncomfortable feeling when they introduce new people; are the old ones dead? Oh my god. Are they going to find their bodies? Is this going to be the community center all over again?

Okay, so you have to have read the others in this series to get that, but I think you know where I'm going here. And Autumn: Aftermath set my mind to rest in many ways. As a final book, it did the series wonderful justice by letting us peek in on our favourite bands of survivors. If it didn't highlight everyone, it at least gave you an idea where they might have ended up or how their lives are going right now. No, it didn't tie things up with a happily ever after bow - it wouldn't be a David Moody book if it did that - but it did tell us where the world of Autumn was going, what the fate of the planet might be, and it was, of course, full of action, adventure, fear, adventure and zombies.

I love zombie books. If you do too, you'll like this series. And especially Autumn: Aftermath.

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Book Review - A Working Theory of Love

A Working Theory of Love by Scott Hutchins
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Neill has been chatting with his father. They talk about the old days, when Neill was a boy growing up in the south. They talk about Neill's mom and brother, about the neighbour down the road, and about his dad's medical practice.

The only catch is, Neill's dad killed himself in 1995, when Neill was still in college, before Neill was married and divorced, before he moved to California, before he took up permanent bachelorhood. Neill's dad now resides inside of a computer, an attempt at creating AI from the contents of the extensive journals that his father kept during his life. And it's Neill's job to talk to him.

I love the San Francisco of Neill's world. I relate to his conflicts with his own morality where it comes to this computerized version of his father. I really relate to his young, barely-out-of-her-teens girlfriend, because I was lost like her when I was her age. I made many of the same mistakes and had many similar problems. This book is engaging, vivid, and exquisitely real. It feels like glimpsing into the lives of someone you ran into at the coffee shop or chatted with at a dinner party.

Scott Hutchins has a gift for inner dialogue. Many writers can capture dialogue between characters well but become either overly philosophical or shallowly superficial when it comes to relating what's honestly going on inside a character's head. But here, you get a sense of Neill that is more than personal. I really felt as though I knew him, in an intimate and intense way. I rarely feel as close to a character as I did with Neill, and it made me wish the book would never end.

That said, the ending left me happy. It ended as it should, with a clear path to envision the road ahead, and enough of a wrap-up to leave a reader feeling satisfied without the triteness that comes along with the "happily ever after" epilogues that leave nothing to the reader's imagination.

This is an excellent book for those who like contemporary literary fiction, and I recommend it highly.

*Book received through Goodreads First Reads program

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Book Review - Cut, Crop & Die

Cut, Crop & Die by Joanna Campbell Slan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I had a bit of a hard time getting into this, the second Kiki Lowenstein cozy mystery from Joanna Campbell Slan, filled with bits and bobs about scrapbooking - one of my own favourite hobbies - as well as curious twists and turns surrounding the death of a scrapper at a crop that Time In a Bottle (or TinaB for those in the know), the shop where Kiki is employed, was sponsoring.

The dead woman is one of Kiki's rivals, a scrapbooker who has recently won a prestigious scrapping contest, and apparently has stepped all over everyone in Kiki's life to get here. From her best friend and former cleaning woman Mert, who had once been fired and blacklisted by the woman, to her boss Dodie, who had kicked her out of the store and banned her from shopping there, to some of her most loyal customers (including one who was having an affair with the dead woman's husband), everyone seems to have had a motive for murder. So whodunit? Is it Kiki's new co-employee with a possibly shady past? Was Yvonne's husband looking to start his life over? Could it be the owner of a rival scrapbooking store, looking to generate a buzz?

It took about 90 pages in before I was invested enough to take more time with this book than it took to get through a couple pages at a time. And I was reading this on my eReader, which usually means I zip through a book like nobody's business, because my Kobo goes with me *everywhere*. But this time I found it a little hard to concentrate.

Whatever it was about the first Kiki book that drew me in and got me hooked immediately wasn't quite there for me with this one. Maybe the charm had worn off a little, or maybe I picked this one up too quickly after finishing the last and my head just wasn't ready for it yet, I don't know. Or, maybe, just maybe, it wasn't quite as captivating as the first. I still liked it, and it was still a fun read, though I was sad that there weren't as many new and different scrapbooking techniques and tips at the ends of the chapters. If I really wanted to know about tea and such I'd read a different sort of book. Still, it's fun to read about characters that seem like they could be your friends from your own little scrapbooking store in your home town, so I'll probably read the next soon enough. After all, it's already Kobo-loaded :)

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Book Review - Fear the Worst

Fear the Worst by Linwood Barclay
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is an excellent example of the suspense genre. It is alternately exciting and moving, written with honesty and compassion and the knowledge of what it means to be a parent. It's a very good book.

What would you do if your daughter went missing? What if the people at the job she went to every day denied ever meeting her? What if your ex-wife's new boyfriend's son seemed suspiciously involved, lying to you and hiding in his bedroom on his computer for hours on end, refusing to talk about what he's doing?

Caught between an ex-wife that he still loves, a paranoid new girlfriend who sees conspiracy theories everywhere, and his daughter's friends who seem alternately helpful and annoying, all Tim wants is to bring his teenage daughter home. But the police are unhelpful, and the "security expert" that Bob - the ex-wife's boyfriend - hires seems even worse when it comes out that his expertise means he had a job as a night watchman. Tim's own investigations turn up twist after twist that seem impossible to put together.

This book shocked me with a few of the twists and turns, which is not easy to do, and kept me guessing to the end (well, except for the part where I figured out who the mastermind bad guy was in the first few chapters, LOL! But I read a lot of suspense, I'm hard to mislead). This book was a fun, fast read that kept me up late unable to put it down!

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Book Review - Sanctus

Sanctus by Simon Toyne
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

If you're a fan of international religious suspense intrigue a'la Dan Brown's DaVinci Code books or the Genesis Project books, you're going to love Sanctus by Simon Toyne.

I received a copy of the second book in this series - The Key - from GoodReads and decided after the first page that I really wanted to read this book first. It seemed less stand-alone than the Dan Brown books and, besides, I was really interested in the background of the story.

I'm so glad that I did. This book is a fabulous ride, full of intrigue, suspense, exotic locations, scary monks with guns, bizarre and unexplainable medical mysteries, explosions, a cop who is not only cool but reminds me in some ways of my husband (at least when he talks to/about his wife), and a twisty and intriguing plot that doesn't let go until the last page. And maybe not even then.

This isn't particularly a character-driven story, but there are some very relatable and fun characters here, which makes it all the more fun to root for them as time passes and the plot gets thicker and more interesting. It isn't high literature, but it isn't meant to be; it's meant to be entertaining and it does that very, very well.

I'd love to see this made into a movie. It would be fantastic in that format.

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Book Review - East of Denver

East of Denver by Gregory Hill
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When I first started reading this book, I thought "Brilliant! I'm going to give it five stars! I love character-driven novels and these characters are so compelling! They remind me of people down home in southern Illinois. They're lovely and charming and unique and frustrating and annoying and so heartbreakingly real. Oh, this is going to be such a lovely relaxing read with more depth than action, and a nice break from the suspense and horror I've been reading lately!"

When I got about halfway through this book, I thought, "Hmmm. Okay, maybe only four stars. While I appreciate the delicacy that's used to outline these characters in their day to day life, it's starting to get a bit tedious. Just how many doorknobs can you fix, anyway?". At that point, I'd forgotten that I'd read the back cover of the book - I know, I know, but it really is possible.

So, when the main character suddenly decides to rob his hometown bank, I literally sat up in bed, where I'd been reading in hopes of reading my overstimulated brain to sleep, and said "Oh my god!" and got poked by a mostly sleeping husband who was rather annoyed. So I took the book out to the sofa, because I knew then and there that I would not be sleeping until I finished it. That is also why I'm writing this review at almost two thirty in the morning.

As the book went on, I found myself ever more frustrated and confused by the choices some of the characters make. In some places, I had issues with suspension of disbelief and actually rolled my eyes. I decided about three-quarters of the way through the book that I was only going to give it a three-star review, because some of it was driving me crazy, and I wondered at some points if now the author was just playing a joke on me. What happened to my sweet little character driven before-bed book?

And then, as I finished the book and realized I desperately didn't want it to end, and that it had kept me incredibly engaged, I knew that three stars just wasn't enough. It deserved four for the sharply drawn characters, the lyrical prose, and the story that kept me awake and drawn to this book until I pushed through to the end of it. It is lovely and sweet in places, raw and unforgiving in others. It takes a hard look at antipathy and what entropy can do to a life, and a world, and a home. It's fascinating and riveting, and worth reading.

*Book received at no cost through Goodreads First Reads program

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Book Review - Autumn: Disintigration

Autumn: Disintegration by David Moody
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Ever finish a book and say to yourself, "Whew, what a ride!" ?

That's how I feel right now.

The fourth installment in the Autumn Zombie series by David Moody, Autumn: Disintegration takes you off in an entirely new direction than the previous books. I had bemoaned the fact that my previous read in the series, billed as 3.5, told me the ending of what happened to the previous group of survivors, worried it would spoil the rest of the books for me. I was soon to discover that wasn't the case.

Though I was cranky when book two introduced new survivors instead of carrying on the original storyline, here I was thrilled. I guess that things had gone about as far as they could be taken, for me, in the other story line, and this opened up fresh new characters and perspectives in this post-apocalyptic world overrun by the living dead.

It's somehow fresh and interesting, fun and exciting, and full of action and wild suspense. It's a rocky ride, and I still get cranky when I see someone use the word "germ" as many times as this author does, and some of the characters are a little cliché, but overall it's exactly what it's meant to be: pure entertainment.

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